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by Scott Frangos

When you’re building a new website, or revising an old one, a good CMS is an excellent site structure solution to help make editing and posting easy (no programming knowledge needed), optimize for search engines, and get the word out via RSS. You should compare and test-drive the demos offered at the sites below. Flexibility, support, and a robust development community are primary considerations when making your final choice.

Here’s my list of the top 10 open source (free to download, install and use) CMS programs:

1. Joomla - A favorite with designers, Joomla is used by large and small organizations as a flexible and powerful CMS solution offering over 2,800 extensions.

2. Drupal - Known for a powerful blend of features, Drupal is popular with a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. Over 2,000 modules are available for added functionality.

3. WordPress - A simple semantic publishing system that began as blogging software and has evolved into a robust but simple to use CMS with an excellent support community, and over 1400 free “themes” (templates) and 1200-plus plugins. Note that WordPress.com (not .org) offers a free version of the program with hosting on their site, as opposed to downloading and installing the program on your own hosting server.

4. Post-Nuke - PostNuke can do anything from traditional blog websites, to a community members’ only website with hundreds of users. Offers modules, blocks, themes and over 140 plugins for extensibility.

5. Xoops - XOOPS is an extensible, easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. A variety of themes and over 325 modules are available.

6. e107 - This CMS is maintained by a loyal cadre of programmers and developers and offers over 190 plugins.

7. Typo3 - Positioned as a small to medium size enterprise CMS solution, Typo3 features a detailed user permissions system for managing and editing workflows. An extension library is available.

8. Moodle - This CMS is focused on providing an online education framework, and includes quiz, student grading, and online classroom administration. Over 300 modules, and plugins are available.

9. phpWebsite - Founded and hosted by the Web Technology Group at Appalachian State University, phpWebSite is developed by the phpWebSite Development Team, a network of developers from around the world. Over 80 modules and 20 themes are available.

10. Geeklog - Geeklog is a CMS with support for comments, trackbacks, multiple syndication formats, spam protection, and more. A number of plugins are available.

I’ve been fortunate to use a number of these in building websites for clients, and my own personal favorites are Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. You should be able to find a good hosting company that will offer free and easy installation of these programs — I recommend our hosting company, WebFaddsHosting.com.

About the Author: Scott Frangos is Managing Editor for WebHelperMagazine.com, and writes the OpenSourceWebMaster.com Blog there. He also builds dynamic Blog and CMS websites with WordPress for WebFadds.com (WebFaddsHosting.com is a sister site) and is a college level instructor for Graphics and WebMaster subjects. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Pepper, and their three dogs: Wisdom, Spirit, and Steggman, and is a great believer in the power of CMS websites.

Copyright: This article released under Creative Commons Attribution License, and as such may be republished as long as the author information and live links to his websites are left intact.